Ford Motor and Chinese search engine Baidu invest into Velodyne LiDAR

August 16, 2016 //
By Julien Happich

Velodyne LiDAR is to receive a combined $150 million investment from co-investors Ford Motor Company and China’s leading search engine company Baidu, both looking at LiDAR sensors to enable future autonomous vehicles.

With this investment, Velodyne hopes to rapidly expand the design and production of high performance, cost effective automotive LiDAR sensors for their mass adoption in autonomous vehicle and ADAS applications.

“This investment will accelerate the cost reduction and scaling of Velodyne’s industry-leading LiDAR sensors, making them widely accessible and enabling mass deployment of fully autonomous vehicles”, commented David Hall, founder and CEO of Velodyne LiDAR.

“We want the cost to be low enough to be used for all cars”, emphasized Marta Hall, Velodyne President of Business Development.

Over the last decade, Velodyne developed four generations of hybrid solid-state LiDAR systems incorporating the company’s proprietary software and algorithms that interpret rich data gathered from the environment via highly accurate laser-based sensors to create high resolution 3D digital images used for mapping, localization, object identification and collision avoidance.

The company boasts its LIDAR solutions are capable of producing 300K to 2.2 million data points per second with a range up to 200 meters at centimetre-level accuracy.

Velodyne expects an exponential increase in LiDAR sensor deployments in autonomous vehicles and ADAS applications over the next several years, driving high revenue growth. To fulfill the high demand for Velodyne’s products, the company will continue to expand its resources across engineering, operations and manufacturing. In connection with this minority investment round, the Company plans to expand its board of directors to include two independent industry executives.

“Baidu is developing autonomous vehicles with the intention to increase passenger safety and reduce traffic congestion and pollution in China,” said Jing Wang, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Autonomous Driving Unit of Baidu.